KILLINGTON, Vt. — Mikaela Shiffrin made her debut on the professional World Cup ski racing tour in 2011 when she was 15. Two years later, she was the first American to win two World Cup races before she was 18.
Times have changed. Before a recent race, Shiffrin was looking at the list of competitors when she realized — gasp! — she was older than nearly half the field.
“I’ve been used to being the baby,” said Shiffrin, 23. “But now I hear the birth year of some girls and I swear it sounds like ‘2017,’ and I’m like, ‘Wait, what?'”
A teenage phenomenon no longer, Shiffrin is an adult with all the trappings of the modern pro athlete: a gaggle of sponsors and a brand to cultivate, public appearances and media obligations, and yes, an ambitious throng of up-and-comers nipping at her heels. It’s no wonder that Shiffrin, perhaps the most precocious talent in her sport’s history, spent part of her offseason shadowing Roger Federer.
“I’ve been thinking: Oh, man, this is what it felt like for everybody else when I was coming up the ranks,” Shiffrin said as she sat in a Colorado condo after a training session this month.
But Shiffrin, a three-time Olympic medalist and the two-time defending women’s World Cup overall champion, is not overly vexed by her veteran status.
“Everybody goes through it — time keeps moving on,” she said. “We get older and hopefully more mature.”
Moreover, when asked if she felt her career was entering a new stage, she answered without the slightest hesitation: “I feel like I’m constantly entering a different stage.”
That may be the most apt description of Shiffrin’s incandescent career.
Shiffrin’s charge through the ski racing record books — she is on a pace to shatter a host of World Cup and Olympic records — could continue this weekend with two World Cup races at the Killington ski resort in Vermont. Shiffrin has become the pied piper and the main attraction of the event, which returned to Vermont for the first time in nearly 40 years in 2016.
Since then, the Killington races have drawn some of the biggest crowds on the women’s circuit, a tour primarily based in Europe.
Shiffrin has continued to represent the new guard of ski racing in the United States, especially with Lindsey Vonn retiring after this season. Vonn injured her knee in training Monday, which will delay her debut on this year’s World Cup circuit.
Shiffrin is careful not to be seen as nudging Vonn out of the way when Vonn is only four victories from tying the record for most career World Cup wins (86), set in 1989 by Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden.
But Shiffrin at 23 is what 34-year-old Vonn was 11 years ago: a complete skier entering her prime. Shiffrin, like Vonn before her, is the rare breed willing to tackle the mental and physical demands of competing in all five race categories, from the relatively low speeds but technical difficulty of the slalom to the daredevil danger of the downhill.
With the substantial triumphs and one hard-earned disappointment from the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics now in Shiffrin’s rearview mirror, she embarks on a new season. That includes, of course, the changes in the latest chapter of an already eventful career.
Maybe the best way to depict what’s different with Shiffrin now is to consider how she spent her offseason. She used to look forward to several weeks of summer at her parents’ Colorado home, where she would catch up on unviewed episodes of favorite television shows, like “Madam Secretary” or “Blue Bloods.”
This year, Shiffrin went on a Caribbean vacation with her boyfriend, French ski racer Mathieu Faivre; was a presenter at the ESPY Awards; attended a festival in Cannes; and, providently, came in regular contact with Federer, who, like Shiffrin, is sponsored by pasta maker Barilla.
At functions with Federer, Shiffrin found herself assiduously studying how the tennis star behaved and interacted with the public.
“He was engaged with every person he was talking to — it wasn’t like he was just looking at his phone and not them,” she said. “I don’t even think he had his phone with him. I watched how he conducted himself around people in general or with the media. It was eye-opening to see how fully he gave of himself.
“It was an important thing for me to learn at this point in my career.”
Comportment is increasingly imperative to Shiffrin because her many accomplishments have led to a plethora of valuable partnerships with corporate sponsors, who expect certain standards, and not just those achieved on a ski slope.
“I often think of myself as a literal investment,” she said. “It sounds serious, like kind of dehumanizing, but I’m conscious of the brand. I think there are some athletes who don’t think about that enough.
“I’m a human and a person, and a ski racer. But I have sponsors who invest in me hoping that I’m going to stay the course and have success. I feel like you don’t want to skirt around that.”
To that end, despite her new offseason interests, Shiffrin said she had not altered her usual, exacting routine of on-snow race training in the Southern Hemisphere, along with hourslong daily gym work. This winter, she still expects to expand her experience as a speed skier and enter more downhill and super-G races, something that will be watched with heightened interest within the greater ski racing community.
It will be a taxing schedule to maintain, and undoubtedly the most significant test to her continued ascent in the sport.
At the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, for example, weather delays compressed the race timetable and added to Shiffrin’s overall race fatigue, which caused her to withdraw from the downhill and super-G events.
With probably two, or maybe three, more Olympic Games in her future, learning to manage her time and conserve her energy was undoubtedly among the most crucial lessons.
At Pyeongchang, she won a silver medal in the combined event and dominated the giant slalom to become only the third American to win two Olympic Alpine gold medals. But in her best event, the slalom, where she regularly wins races by wide margins, she was a surprising fourth.
The day before the slalom, the ceremony in which she would receive her giant slalom gold medal went deep into the night, keeping Shiffrin awake more than two hours past her usual bedtime. She is known for requiring at least nine hours of sleep a day; her preparation for the next day’s race would begin around 6 a.m.
Knowing that the other medal recipients that night were not competing the next day, Shiffrin said she begged officials to allow her to receive her medal earlier in the ceremony. But the order was prearranged; Shiffrin, one of the featured athletes in the games, was scheduled to appear on the awards stage last.
“They said to me, ‘This is the Olympics, this is the way it goes,'” Shiffrin said. “And I thought: You know what? I did just win an Olympic gold medal and I’m going to enjoy it. I’m going to do every single interview and have fun at the awards and not really worry about having to refocus for the slalom, because what’s going to happen is going to happen.
“I was hoping for the best.”
A scarf draped across her shoulders, Shiffrin shrugged. She looked neither upset nor satisfied, maybe even just a bit older and wiser.
“It didn’t quite work out,” she said. “You live and learn.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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